


stars in the night sky

by orphan_account



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Anxiety, Dreams, Future Character Death, Gen, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 09:33:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3129689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You wake up from dreaming. You cannot quite let go. You never can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stars in the night sky

**Author's Note:**

> Written on my tablet, so I'm sorry if I didn't catch all mistakes. Thought about checking the warning for 'Major Character Death' but it's not actual MCD, so I didn't.

Day dawns. A pale light through the shutters. It barely reaches your bed.

You open your eyes, lashes trembling. The ceiling is naked stone. Cold, hard. It could be your chest.

The echo of a fingertip down your cheek drags you back inside your head.

\---

Sometimes, you think, it’ll go like this:

You’ll be out on a hunt. The ground will be slippery with dirt beneath your feet as you’ll try to run silently after Arthur and his knights. It won’t have changed, then; Arthur will still drag you along wherever he pleases like a boy with his favourite wooden sword. Not many things will have changed. You’ll trip over a root or two, make a racket, chase the game away. Arthur will turn to you, glowering. He’ll deliver a slap to the back of your head that you’ll take with an impish grin, perhaps with a quip about Arthur’s hunting skills. You’ll laugh about it. The knights will laugh about it. You’ll bite the inside of your lower lip to keep from grinning as you’ll watch Arthur vainly trying not to laugh along, and it will work, mostly. You’ll be caught in the moment, all of you, and despite the lost opportunity of bringing home a nice fat boar or a graceful deer, the world will be all right: the sky will be blue behind the leafy canopy, the air will smell wet and fresh from last night’s rainfall, and Arthur’s grin, when it will break through (it will), will be wide and untamed in this one, single moment.

And you, you’ll stare at the beauty of this sight, completely beside yourself for this one, single moment.

So: no. Not many things will have changed.

Which is why right after—or five minutes later, twenty minutes later, an hour later; it doesn’t matter how much later, but the moment _will come_ , as inevitable as sunset—out of the bushes bandits will burst forth wanting the crown prince’s head, and everyone will get ready to fight. The knights will charge forward, and Arthur will grab you by the arm and shove you away from the battlefield, out of the bandits’ reach, the very first thing he always does. He’ll do it then. He’ll throw himself into battle, and steel will meet steel. Instead of rain, the earth will drink blood. Instead of flowers, the undergrowth will hold dead bodies. It won’t be anything new. You know this. It’ll be a fight, vicious and dirty. You’ve been in a hundred.

This one, though, it will be a mean one.

They’ll outnumber you. They’ll force the knights to the ground. They’ll force Arthur to the ground.

And maybe they’ll force you to the ground too, gag you and drug you so magic won’t be an option then, and you’ll have to watch through a body rigid with horror as they’ll strike Arthur down.

His blood will sprinkle the ground, you’ll think, like so many stars in the night sky.

*

It doesn’t have to be a hunt. It can be a day like any other, an event like any other. It can be all the things that already happened: an embittered witch wanting to revenge her son by taking Arthur off-guard at a feast, throwing a knife aimed at his heart. And if it’s not a feast, it’s a tournament, Arthur being poisoned to death by the bite of a snake. If it’s not a tournament, it’s a treacherous family member playing dirty, selling Arthur to the enemies. If it’s not a family member, it’s a magical beast killing itself through the entire town until it reaches him.

All of them: man, monster, foe, friend. It doesn’t matter. They all want Arthur. His golden crown, his proud head, his pulsing heart. They want him on his knees, want him bent before a whipping post to tear his skin to pieces. They want his present to be full of bitter tears for his father’s past, tears that will turn bloody instead of just saline. They want him to be Prometheus, chained to a rock with his skin gaping open for the birds to devour his insides. They want lethal atonement, and none of them will ever rest before Arthur’s life hasn’t withered away like flowers come autumn. They want his life to end not in a normal autumn but an endless one, never to be followed by spring or summer. They want it final, and endless. His endless finality.

They all want him; want his death.

They all want him, but none of them want him the way you do.

*

(Arthur will die.

He will die. He will die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die, and die—

he will choke and grow silent and grow cold and grow absent because he will die.

He will die.)

*

You’re the prince’s servant, and magic is outlawed still. While you hope that you’ll be able to be yourself one day, fully yourself, you’re content staying the way you are now. Being Arthur’s servant has become as much a part of you as the magic, and on some days you can’t tell anymore if these two things ever were separate of one another. It began with genuine dislike on your part that budded into hesitant companionship until Arthur allowed all his barriers to collapse before your feet, so you could step past the curtains of Arthur’s façade into a stiller room made of golden walls and fragile fires, curiously new and curiously familiar. Getting to know Arthur past his performances in the stage plays of royalty was less like discovering something unknown and more like relearning something you already knew, deep down. All his light, all his shadows: he showed them to you, and you gathered them up to lock them inside the box of your chest to hold them there for safekeeping, welcoming them back home. It happened just like the dragon said it would, but it didn’t happen because of it, it happened despite of it: it didn’t happen because you or he were the interchangeable figures of fate the dragon had prophesied, but because the very make-ups of your selves as you were at this point in time merged together like two broken sides of a once-whole. Because you were you, and Arthur was Arthur. Nothing less, and nothing more.

He is the side of your coin as you are his, and you don’t mind being the bottom side facing the ground if it means you can keep Arthur on the top to see the world, for the sun to shine on him. Sometimes you’re not sure who’s made whom; who of you is Pygmalion, falling in love with the thing he made. You’d say you’re Pygmalion and he is your statue simply because he cannot possibly love you as much as you love him, but then, perhaps neither of you is either. Maybe he hasn’t made you, maybe you haven’t made him. Maybe you just are. Maybe you’ve been made of each other because once you were one.

You don’t know. And it doesn’t matter, really. The point is: he is as necessary to you as the air you breathe, and just once, you would like to be the air that inhabits him, for a moment only. You would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

The idea of his death is unthinkable. Impossible.

Impossible spells _I’m possible_.

Negation makes possibility.

*

You often imagine how it goes.

The first time it happens is years into your stay in Camelot. It’s not long before the end, but you don’t know it at that point. When they tell you, it’s not even anything new; it’s just a confirmation of something you’ve somehow always known, but seeing the words on paper and hearing them spoken, having them realized as something outside of your own head where they exist only as thoughts and outside your body where they exist only as emotions, is fatal.

It says: Arthur will die. He will die soon. He will die young. His golden age will remain unfulfilled.

Before, you never had cause to imagine. You’d always been right there, behind or beside or in front of Arthur, protecting him with outstretched hands and golden eyes. It would never happen, you thought, because you would always be there. It would never happen because it could never happen.

Unthinkable. Impossible.

( _I’m possible_.)

Yet, had the last prophecy not come true also? Of the two of you being two sides of a coin? Had it not come true so quickly, so beautifully, so completely? How, and why, should this now be any different?

The notion of it, the idea of it actually happening, once in your head, festers like a thing of ceaseless growth, as potent as a terminal disease with how it absolutely paralyses you.

First, you relive everything; you see the witch and her knife and the fraud with his shield of snakes, Agravaine deceiving and lying (and Uther and Morgana), the Afanc, the Sidhe, the Lamia, the Questing Beast, the Dorocha, the troll… There is no end in sight.

Every dangerous moment becomes every moment, every single moment that you breathe, that you are. You imagine. How it might go. (How it will go.) The knife almost breaching Arthur’s chest becomes the knife slitting his heart; the knife slitting his heart becomes the knives at the dinner table, the knife in Arthur’s hand in the armoury, the knife any random person holds on the way to the kitchen just walking past. This single knife becomes all knives. The snake, too, becomes every (imagined) rustle in the bushes, every (imagined) movement from the corner of your eye, and every (imagined) hiss of pain from a wounded man’s mouth is suddenly the snake’s. Poison waits at every corner. Enemies wait at every corner. Potential allies, neutral people, they all become a threat.

The woods, the castle, a field, a dungeon, Arthur’s own bed: it doesn’t matter where he is, he’s always in danger. He’s always in danger, and you’re always with him. But you might just not be, one day. One day, you might just be too late. One day, it might just happen like this:

You’ll be out on a hunt. Slippery, dirty ground underneath your feet. You’ll run, after the knights, after Arthur. It’ll be the same. You’ll trip, chase the game away, Arthur will glower; you’ll make a quip, you’ll laugh about it. You’ll be struck dumb by Arthur’s grin, when it will break through (it will), because it will be wide and untamed in this one, single moment, and you’ll never have seen a sight as beautiful as this.

So, no. Not many things will have changed.

And that will be the problem of it, of course.

There’ll be a fight. A mean one. They’ll strike you down, all of you, and you, you will see snakes burst forth from the bushes to spill their poison down your throats, and the poison will be knives slitting open your necks downwards until they sit between your ribs, and the knives will be monsters growing fatter heavier larger until they grow in size so much they make your thoracic areas implode from the inside before the monsters become so hungry they’ll sit down on your remains and eat you all, every last bit, until Death standing behind them, watching, will be satisfied enough and lets them go.

You won’t be able to stop Death. You can only misplace his appearance in time backwards, backwards, backwards, until you’ll reach the end of this millimetre-thin cord you’re walking. Death will be the one holding it, will be waiting for you to look up with eyes like empty rooms and a mouth like dried seas.

You’ll have known, of course, that this would happen. You’ll have known, because Death is the one constant throughout it all: your one and only true friend who knows you for what you are. Arthur doesn’t know you like he thinks he does, like you wish he did. Death does: Death looks at you, sees the calamity of your bastard eyes and the fear in the way the thin tendons of your neck tremble. He sees your insomnia, sees how you jerk together at a sudden slight sound like a rabbit about to be killed, sees, worst of all, your single-minded devotion to Arthur that sometimes feels like the end of everything.

And Death will stroke a finger down your cheek and tell you you’re a good boy, because you led him to Arthur. Arthur is the only road, is your only road, and you’ll always lead him to Arthur. You’ve nowhere else to go; there is nowhere else you would ever want to go. Arthur is you, Arthur is everything, all the time.

Death will see, and Death will understand. Death will know. Death has never loved anything more dearly than Arthur.

You would hate it if you weren’t just the same.

\---

Day has dawned. A pale light through the shutters. It barely reaches your bed.

You keep your eyes closed. Your throat works. The burn there aches, like acute thirst. It sits deeply, like a giant tree with its roots in your chest. 

The darkness does not fade when your eyes reluctantly open: it spills from your lashes and lids like too much water and drowns this entire room, this entire castle, this entire world. Drowns your entire world. 

You stare up at the ceiling, and it is naked stone. A moment ago, you thought it cold, thought it hard. Thought it could be your chest.

“Arthur will die,” you whisper, because in your solitude there is honesty. The ceiling is no longer stone: the spray of dirt on it becomes Arthur’s blood, and you see it above you, and this is how you rise and begin the day, begin each day: with Arthur’s blood sprinkled like so many stars on the night sky that is your days.

It is morning, and the day has just dawned, and you have just woken up from sleep. Before you have done anything, you have hated yourself more than others in their entire lifetimes, because again you have spoken to Arthur as though he were dead already.

**Author's Note:**

> also, totally forgot to mention, so sorry: there's a reference to a m atwood poem in there, anyone catch it?


End file.
